From Author to Work

Even before having any familiarity with the authorial presence of a film’s maker, and even before any further interest in film aside from watching movies, I was cognizant of the idea of genre. In fact, the concept seems second nature and common sense to anyone who watches movies. It is practically the foremost way in which we organize the countless entries of the cinematic world. Yet aside from seeing a horror film or a kid’s movie, my familiarity with the concept of genres, and their importance, has been limited to identification.

The fact that humans organize the world around them is not lost on the filmic world. The need to categorize is a way of making our sensory stimulations more accessible and bearable. If we had to take each individual aspect separately, without first filtering through familiar settings, our heads would likely explode. Thus the idea of genre comes naturally. Whenever we ask what kind of movie something is, the likely response is one of genre. We could see these as the broadest possible categories, in essence, what kind of film it is. It becomes obvious how important genre recognition can be, and likewise how important familiarity with the genres can be.

As I have discussed a lot recently, the presence of a filmmaking personality can be a large draw for the success of a film. Additionally, the thorough entrenchment of the auteur theory in today’s critical world has further validated the filmmaker as artist alongside painters, musicians, and writers whose positions have been secured for ages. Now the concept of genre, a concept that is at times directly linked to the auteur, comes into play. Of course, genre, as a basic categorical tool, comes from any other practice where certain kinds of stories are told based on their content and perhaps delivery.

Thus in moving from an author of a work to the work itself, it would be naïve to completely abandon the creator, just as it is impossible to talk about an artist without talking about the artwork. This person is defined, in part, by what they produce. The relationship between author and work can be varied, as the respective oeuvres of Stanley Kubrick and Danny Boyle attest to, or a director’s work may be so consistent in theme and content that one piece blurs into the next.

On the other hand, we can at times ignore the author of a work and talk instead, of the group of works as a whole. Genres are defined by certain characteristics that we can apply film by film. Not that I will be doing this, but the potential is there to evaluate any number of films and their success at representing a particular genre. At the same time, we can cite numerous examples of films that have blurred the line between multiple genres, or simply borrowed components from many and assembled them as desired. The serialization of a film come into play as well when a sequel, while retaining characters or story, etc, is changed from one straight genre to containing aspects of more than one.

It becomes clearer, then, that while at times rigid in content and construction, genres are also malleable and shape shifting. Time changes what we expect, how we see it, and how we evaluate what we see. I am not aiming to trace the path of this or that genre, but simply to explore genre and its place in the modern, and past, cinematic world.